With the recent surge in WebKit adoption, many have stated to question the usefulness of Mozilla's Gecko browsing engine, claiming that WebKit is far superior. Some even go as far as saying that Firefox should ditch Gecko in favour of WebKit. Ars Technica's Ryan Paul explains why that is utter, utter bogus. "From a technical perspective, Gecko is now very solid and no longer lags behind WebKit. A testament to the rate at which Gecko has been improving is its newfound viability in the mobile space, where it was practically considered a nonstarter not too long ago. Mozilla clearly has the resources, developer expertise, and community support to take Gecko anywhere that WebKit can go."

Zealotism against what? I've never seen Firefox "zealots" claiming that Firefox is oh-so-superior to Opera

Well, it's all relative, of course. No one is more annoying than the Opera crowd. (Except maybe some of the Stallmanites, but that's a different category.)

Many people who find browser crashes, even occasional ones, or the inability to kill one misbehaving window or tab to be an annoyance recognize that Chrome's process model makes a great deal of sense. It really doesn't matter what people say about RoR scaling. I've used it, TurboGears, and Django, (the latter 2 being Python based) and if you ask me it has nothing to do with processes vs threads and everything to do with the fact that Ruby is dog slow compared to pretty much any other available language. And I've never heard anyone claim that the problem was a processes vs threads one.

At any rate, the bottom line is that Google made a good solid technical decision, and if it did happen to change some people's minds about threads vs processes... what relevance does that actually have?

Now that both Chrome and IE (Ouch! It hurts to say that!) have implemented that beneficial architectural feature, the Mozilla guys will have to try to bolt it onto Firefox/Gecko. And it will be interesting to see how well that goes and how long it takes.

Many people who find browser crashes, even occasional ones, or the inability to kill one misbehaving window or tab to be an annoyance recognize that Chrome's process model makes a great deal of sense. It really doesn't matter what people say about RoR scaling. I've used it, TurboGears, and Django, (the latter 2 being Python based) and if you ask me it has nothing to do with processes vs threads

Yes processes are useful for misbehaving sites. But that's not the point. The point isn't about questioning the real benefits and cons of processes vs threads, but the *perceived* ones. I'm saying that people suddenly *perceive* processes as being better than threads because Google's using it, and that if Chrome was developed by anybody else, the perception would be totally different and there would be no hype. If Chrome was developed by anybody else, people would scream death and murder because of the higher total memory usage, regardless of the ability to kill misbehaving tabs. And this Google hype is exactly what fuels the Chrome/WebKit zealotism.

And I've never heard anyone claim that the problem was a processes vs threads one.

This person's comment is not true: running multiple Mongrel (Rails) processes doesn't block the other processes. But my point still stands: people don't understand what processes and threads really are, and *perceive* threads as superior regardless of whether they actually are.

I'm saying that people suddenly *perceive* processes as being better than threads because Google's using it, and that if Chrome was developed by anybody else, the perception would be totally different and there would be no hype.

And I am saying that you are wrong. You might have an argument if processes did not make so much sense in this context. You might have an argument if Google had made poor design decisions and yet were getting accolades over Chrome. But they did not. They made exceptionally good ones. You are arguing that since people are recognizing that Google made exceptionally good design decisions with Chrome that it must all be just a bunch of hype and Google fanboyism. And that makes no sense whatsoever. (Norman, coordinate!)

In fact, trying to make such a specious argument calls into question your own objectivity.